The Numbers Have it!

Yes! Numbers fabric win!

I have several things I need to work on this week, the Asterisk quilt being one of them.  I need to get it to the top stage at least.  I am hoping it can get further than that, but it may not make it by the River City meeting.

And I need to at least start on that Challenge quilt.  You won't believe what I pulled in the bag.  Me! The most modern person in the room.  I get the least modern fabric in the room.  I am going to need help that one for sure!


In preparation for retirement, Frank has been making some bold strides.  He bought a computer and I made him get the Geek Squad support package on it since I refuse to get frustrated with him trying to help him understand what he doesn't know and I don't know.  Now he can just call the Geek Squad 24/7 and he can be polite and they can be polite and they can have a sweet fest all night now with each other whilst they figure out his computer!

The other thing is to get Netflix.  And to practice, we are binge watching our first program.  OJ Simpson Trial.

 It took us a while to figure out how to get the controls to work. And we still have our moments.

The weather across the nation was bad for most of the weekend.  Ours was Saturday.  We had a tornado nearby between Carrie's house and ours.  No one was hurt.

This is where the flood waters came  up from.  You can see it is clear and nearly dry, so we are safe!  Barb made Dale go out and check it twice during the storm.  The rain was coming down so hard you could barely see the trees. 

Temperatures fell to 38 last night and will again tonight.  It
is almost May!

About 4 1/2 inches of  rain fell in 45 minutes.  Then for the rest of the afternoon we had another 1 1/2 inch on top of that.  We were never in danger, but the street in front of the house did have standing water.  Something we have not seen before.  I am guessing it is because of  the 4 inches in the 45 minutes.





After the weather cleared we were able to get to Denham Springs and spend a few minutes at the Artist Reception for the Juried and Emerging Artists Exhibition at Livingston Parish Art Council. 


Here is my piece called Speechless. 

Don't you love to see your work hanging in a gallery somewhere!

Mesoscale Convective Vortex

We had was is called a Mesoscale Convective Vortex last night.  I had never heard of that so I looked it up. 

From Wikipedia "A mesoscale convective vortex (MCV) is a low-pressure center within a mesoscale covective system (MCS) that pulls winds into a circling pattern, or vortex. With a core only 30 to 60 miles wide and 1 to 3 miles  deep, an MCV is often overlooked in standard weather analysis^.   But an MCV can take on a life of its own, persisting for up to 12 hours after its parent MCS has dissipated. This orphaned MCV will sometimes then become the seed of the next thunderstorm outbreak. An MCV that moves into tropical waters, such as the Gulf of Mexico, can serve as the nucleus for a tropical storm or hurricane."

The place we get our bikes serviced was nearly destroyed.  The roof was ripped open and a lot of he bikes were blown around and damaged.  And the place that makes Bengal Roach Spray had one of its walls blown in.  A friend said the latch on their wooden fence was blown off and they have never found the latch!

In our neighborhood, we saw lots of big tree branches downed when we were doing a mile walk with the Bad Basset Boys this morning.

My cable and phone and TV and computer came back on about 10:30 this morning.  And I immediately got 4 phone calls wanting to know if we were OK.  

I spent the morning working on my quilt block tree branches until the nice guy from AAA came to change out the tire on Frank's car.  But he did not leave me his key and my key for his car is in MY car.  Oye!

So I called Frank  We got the car open, then had problems getting the trunk open to get the spare.  Called Frank.  So got that open, and couldn't find the key for the lug nuts.

Called Frank.  Found the lug nut key. Geez.

Then i had to download all the stuff from his trunk.  Gears, crankshafts, drug testing kits, presentation folders.  How does he get all that into the trunk?







And Hey, do you think he has enough napkins in his glove box???????

Fast winds and my leaves are scattered

We had a tornado come through on Saturday night. I had gone to a cooking class and luckily ten minutes after I arrived home it hit. The weathermen say there was "no tornadic action in the Baton Rouge area" but I am here to tell you they are just plain wrong!

Our house is fine, but we lost power for 17 hours overnight and into Sunday morning. Telephone poles were snapped in half on one of the main drags nearby. Frank spent all day Sunday picking up branches and cleaning leaves from the yard. When I rode through the "expensive" subdivision, nearly every house had a huge tree cut up in front of their lots waiting for the green trash pick up people.
And in the process my leaves were disturbed so that I got them mixed up from the envelopes. I think it was Hurricane DiNozzo, because I took two empty envelopes from his mouth yesterday morning. Anyway, I think these are the correct attributions.

B's leaves on my patio with leaves that were clogging my rain gutters on the house.

S's exotic leaves on the nandinas on the side of the garden path

I never found the envelope for this one again. I am pretty sure they are V's leaves displayed on my coleus and rosemary pot. It was a good idea in my head, but not so good visually!

And this is L's mixed in with mine:

I have to go now and see what that dog has in his mouth NOW!  He is going to drive me crazy!

glen

Fast winds and fast times



From NBC 33 news photos

When I had just gotten home from the cooking class yesterday the winds began to blow and the rain came down furiously.  Frank kept yelling, Microburst!  and I thought he was nuts.  But after surveying the damage in our close area it may well have been one of those mini tornadoes.  We were without lights from 4:30 pm to 8 this morning.  Telephone poles were twisted and one was completely snapped in half.  And trees were down everywhere.  One apartment wall was stripped completely of its bricks, which were then hurled at this poor woman driving by!  Not funny, but can you imagine seeing 15 bricks heading toward you for no apparent reason?

Yesterday was the Italian Dinner Party Cooking Class with my favorite chef Enzo.  He showed us how to cook a 4 course dinner party for 8 with the most spectacular dishes and still have time to socialize with our friends. Some highlights from the class, well, heck you just want to see the food, don't you!

Here he is roasting a pepper.  Isn't he a dreamboat?  A good looking man who cooks like this?  I could just near abouts leave Frank (who only vacuums).

Is there anything better than Marscapone Cheese?  Not in this world.  Mix it with some strawberries and whipping cream and you get these beauties!

Yeah buddy, can you say food orgy?

Next he set up the Gorgonzola potatoes.  here it is just as it came out of the oven.  The hunk of Gorgonzola he used was incredibly beautiful and streaked with blue.  Again the whipping cream, but not too much!

The pasta course started with sea scallops and ended with the most incredible lasagna pasta you have ever seen.  He does his lasagna with tiny flat noodles with ruffly edges, not the big thick one with ruffly edges.  Hmm.  They provided a lot of surface for the Alfredo mother sauce to stick so you really didn't need a lot of sauce.

Then the salade course was Scaloppine Maiale.  He used pork rather than veal and showed us how to butcher the loin for use as thin medallions for the arugula and Caresse salad.  Another masterpiece from the hands of the master!

Here are the salads (and wine!!) waiting for the medallions to arrive before being distributed to the masses. 

 

This is what it looked like as just before I dove into the plate with wild abandon!

I see I am doing this all backward.  But the first thing Enzo did was to create an Antipasto plate on his grandmother's dish from way back in Italy.  It came here with the grandparents and got used at his father's restaurant in New Orleans and now we had the good fortune to share food from it.

His Antipasto consisted of the roasted bells, balsamic mushrooms (what are they called, those big ones?), hard salami made into cones with buffalo mozzarella inside, a wild assortment of olives, grape tomatoes with olive oil and mozzarella, Parmesan cheese sliced thin thin thin, cappicoa or prosciutto, and some tiny thin lemon asparagus spears.

Don't you want to take that man home with you and give him anything he wants in return for his cooking?

glen